Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of President Obama’s court nominee, Merrick Garland, was the beginning of a drama that spurred Democrats’ latest disillusionment with the Supreme Court. President Trump’s appointment of two young — well, more like “young” — conservative judges, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, seems to have unleashed an urgent strain of thought in some liberal circles: The court is broken and it needs fixing.
The solution? For some, it’s court-packing.
You’ve likely heard of the concept in history books, referring to a time back in the 1930s when President Franklin Roosevelt was fed up with the Supreme Court’s continual rejection of some elements of his New Deal plan. To get around the impasse, he proposed the addition of up to six new justices to the court in an effort to shift the ideological balance to the more liberal end of the spectrum.
Roosevelt failed to pack the highest court, but his novel little idea has attracted renewed interest in the Trump era. Political scientist David Faris wrote a book, published this spring, called “It’s Time To Fight Dirty,” a kind of highbrow manual for ratfucking one’s way to institutional change. Faris told me the idea for the book came in the wake of the 2016 election, when he was filled with rage. “The whole idea was born out of bleakness,” he said. “It unleashed some creativity.”
The book is full of strategies Democrats could use to regain power, like making Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states and expanding membership in the House of Representatives (a topic recently taken up by the editorial board of The New York Times). But one chapter in which Faris outlines a plan to pack the Supreme Court and instate term limits for the justices has gotten perhaps the most attention. Faris credits an organization called Fix The Court for coming up with some of the specifics of the plan he outlines in the book: a constitutional amendment revoking lifetime tenure for the federal judiciary, a law that allows the president to appoint a justice in the first and third year of his term of office and that imposes 18-year term limits on justices, and a restructuring that increases the number of justices on the Supreme Court to 11 or 13, “depending on how many justices President Trump ends up appointing.”
